


The Unknown Distance to the Great Beyond

by orphan_account



Category: The Listener (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 03:57:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18112805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "The end, when it comes, comes at a Blue Jays game."Toby pushes himself too far. Michelle survives the aftermath.





	The Unknown Distance to the Great Beyond

**Author's Note:**

> The Listener fandom was tiny to start with and has now been dead and buried for many years, so of course I found the show and had to write a sad story to send out into the void. Set vaguely 2015-ish, so a year or so after the end of the show.

The end, when it comes, comes at a Blue Jays game.

They find out about the bomb after the fans have already filed into the park, when it’s too late for evacuation to be a viable option in the time that’s left. The conspirator Toby read knew there was a bomb, knew the approximate time it was supposed to go off, but didn’t know where it was going to be.

They have to find it. They have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 minutes to do so. It’s not going to be enough.

“Toby, _please,”_ Michelle says. She’s drowning in a sea of blue, surrounded by Bautista jerseys and Encarnacion jerseys and cheering, bright-eyed children. All these people. So many people.

Toby shakes his head. He’s ghost-pale. “There’s too many,” he says. “I can’t read them all.”

Michelle instinctively touches her gun, as though she could somehow shoot her way out of this. These people are all going to die. Everything they’ve done to get to this point, and it isn’t going to be enough.

“This is impossible!” Toby raises his voice over the buzz of the crowd. “To find him, I’d have to already know where he was!” His tone is as close to panic as she’s ever heard from him. He’s normally so reserved, so contained within his own head, but now he paces, scrubbing his hands through his hair.

Then he goes still, drops his head, takes a breath. After a few seconds, he looks up. His face has gone still as stone, but his eyes blaze. “No,” he says quietly. “No.”

“Toby-”

“Shh,” he tells her. He closes his eyes again and sits down on the concrete stair, bracing himself against the railing.

Michelle watches as he goes rigid, as his muscles lock, as his back arches. She doesn’t interfere. She doesn’t try to stop him, not even when the blood starts to pour from his nose.

His eyes snap open, crimson and bleeding. “Hotel,” he chokes, pointing a shaking hand toward the glass windows of the Marriott beyond the outfield seats. “Room 110. Go.”

She runs, grabbing for her radio to contact hotel security. They have a chance. Suddenly, miraculously, there’s a chance.

-

After it’s over, after the suspect is in custody and the bomb is being disassembled, Michelle’s body thrums with leftover adrenaline. She’s exhausted but so wired she can’t sit still. She stares at the wall, her head full of static, until Dev touches her arm. When she jumps, he says softly, “Sorry. I was talking to you, but I don’t think you heard me.”

She shakes her head and scrubs her hands over her face. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

She opens her eyes then and gets her first good look at his expression, and the bottom drops out of the world.

“Toby,” she says.

Dev’s face crumples, just for an instant. It makes him look very young.

She should have known. What Toby did wasn’t - shouldn’t have been possible, but it’s _Toby._ He finds a way. He always comes through, and he’s always all right.

“They took him to the hospital,” Dev says. “Last I heard, they just said they were working on him.” He pauses, tries to gather himself. “Um, I don’t think it’s very good. He was having seizures. There was a lot of blood.”

Michelle nods. She feels as though she’s floating 20 feet away from her body, watching someone else control her movements remotely.

“Let’s go,” she says. Dev doesn’t have to ask where.

-

It’s Oz who comes to find them. Michelle isn’t sure why. Maybe because he blames them - which he should - and wants to see their faces when they realize what they’ve done. Maybe just because he needs something, anything, to do so that he won’t collapse on the spot.

“Toby experienced a massive cerebral hemorrhage,” Oz tells them. “He’s brain dead.” He stares into the middle distance. It obviously hasn’t fully hit him yet. It won’t be pretty when it does.

Michelle realizes, detachedly, that the same is true for her. For all of them, maybe, though Dev is already turning away, cupping his hands over his face, chest heaving.

“Can we see him?” Michelle asks. It makes her angry that she sounds so calm.

Oz’s mouth twists. He looks like he wants to yell at her, and then he just looks exhausted. “Yeah. They’ve got him on life support. He’s not, um, there anymore, but…” His voice breaks. He turns away and covers his eyes.

“Oz,” Michelle says. “I’m so sorry.”

He nods jerkily. Doesn’t look at her.

“Toby saved thousands of lives today. All those people get to live because of him,” she says.

Oz nods again.

“I just wish he could have lived too,” Michelle whispers. Her knees give out and she drops into a chair, and just like that her chest is on fire and her face is wet.

She sits. There are voices. Someone brings her a blanket. When she looks up, Oz is gone and Dev is crouched in front of her, patting her knee, looking equal measures worried and heartbroken.

“I’m fine,” Michelle says, and immediately loses it again, hiding her face behind her blanket.

Toby must have been dying already when he pointed her to the hotel, when he gave her the room number. Those were probably the last words he ever said. As his brain hemorrhaged, he held on long enough to save her, to save everyone. He was so stubborn. He was so brave. He was her friend.

She shouldn’t have let this happen.

_Oh God, Tia. Someone is going to have to tell Tia._

Michelle realizes distantly that she is in shock.

Eventually Adam’s voice swims into her hearing. She rockets up from the chair to cling to him. He’s saying something. She can’t tell what it is.

The embrace brings her back to herself. She calms down enough to tell Adam that she’s okay. The bomb didn’t go off. They saved a stadium full of people. She’s not the one who’s dead. Only Toby is dead.

“You should see him,” Adam says gently. “Before … well, while you can.”

She nods. She doesn’t want to. It won’t be Toby, not really. Not his knowing smirk and his uncanny blue eyes. But it’s all that is left of him, and if she doesn’t go when she has the chance…

Michelle goes. She was right; it isn’t Toby, but it _is_ Toby’s hands and face and unruly dark hair, and she sits in the chair beside his bed and wants to cry forever.

“I know you can’t hear me,” she says after a while. “But I guess if anyone could still hear while brain dead, it would be you.”

The machines beep and hiss.

Michelle leans forward and takes Toby’s hand. His fingers already feel cold. “If somehow that part of you is still … still there, and you can hear this, I want you to know that I’m so proud of you, and I’m so grateful and so sorry. You’re a hero. You’re my friend. I’m going to miss you so much.”

He squeezes her hand.

The doctors had warned her that he might move. Just reflexes, they'd said; muscles contracting aimlessly. She squeezes back, her throat aching, and hopes and hopes and hopes that they’re wrong, just this once.

Toby isn’t like anyone else. She’ll believe that he heard her, and that he fought his way back through death to let her know that he did. She has to believe that. She doesn’t know how she’ll live if she doesn’t.

Tia arrives. She’s brave but her face crumples when she sees not-Toby-anymore, and Michelle eases quietly back out into the waiting room. Adam asks her if she’s ready to go home now. She shakes her head. He kisses her on the forehead and leaves to care for their daughter.

Michelle is still there when they turn off the machines. Only after the room is quiet and all the monitors have been shut off does she finally go home to hold her family and begin the work of putting herself back together.


End file.
